Fire of the Dark Triad by Asya Semenovich

Author:Asya Semenovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2021-05-07T16:22:17+00:00

PART IV:

THE

OBSESSION

Earth

Nick had been up for so many hours that he had to resort to ever-larger doses of stimulants to keep the ship on course, and his mind eventually began to rebel by creating periodic glitches – for example, he suddenly noticed that he had been staring at the navigation screens for who knows how long without making any sense of the data. He needed a break, and he was lucky that all of the system indicators were green at the moment, except, of course, the status of the biomass that was keeping Lita alive. That light was stale red, and the expiration time kept oscillating between three days and three hours. The sensor was slightly off like every other monitor on the ship, but it was clear that the biomass wouldn’t last much longer.

They were on the fastest possible route home from Y-3, and he had already sent an emergency request for an ambulance. There was nothing else he could do to speed things up, and it was better not to think about the red indicator.

He tried to picture Lita’s face. He hadn’t seen her, locked inside the vat, since they left Beta Blue. He liked to imagine that she was sleeping, dreaming of something good. He told himself not to check her vitals again. They wouldn’t have changed, frozen in time, as long as the biomass held up.

He checked. They hadn’t changed. But his palms got clammy.

He got up, swiped the navigation screens to the background of his vision, and walked out into the corridor. He was going to the medical wing again. He would just stand in that room, brightly lit and empty except for the smooth white cask in the corner, until one of the navigation indicators showed signs of instability, and then he would have to go back to work.

He had to pass through a common area on his way, and he really hoped it would be empty this time. But Hilgor was there, slowly pacing back and forth, his head slightly tilted, indicating that he was fully immersed in his work. Nick tried to quietly slip by, but Hilgor abruptly stopped and peered at Nick with keen intensity.

“How is it going?” he asked, and something in his voice suggested that it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “You are spending all your time in the control room. Nick, you almost don’t sleep.”

Nick casually leaned against the wall. “I know, I haven’t been around much these past few days,” he said in an upbeat tone. “Don’t take it personally. I just need to keep a closer eye on the ship’s systems.”

“What’s wrong with the ship, Nick?” Hilgor asked quickly.

Nick hesitated for a moment. He hadn’t mentioned to his passengers that he had skipped a safety stop after crossing the Y-3 Mirror Sector boundary, and that the ship’s autopilot had been progressively failing as a result. But it was becoming too hard to maintain the illusion of business as usual, and they were at the end of their journey anyway.

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